Here’s How To Prove the Value of SEO for Your Customers

Business executives often ask search engine optimizers to prove the value of their work. This may happen whether you’re an SEO reseller or you offer SEO services directly to your clients yourself. In fact, this is a situation all marketers have faced. It started around the same time that businesses first discovered the value of hiring professionals to attract new customers.

In the past, it was often difficult for marketers to prove the worth of their hard work. Even when sales increased, business owners were sometimes skeptical. They wondered if it wasn’t their own hard work that brought customers to their business.

Thanks to the power of data analytics, it is now easier than ever to show how doing SEO for your customers provides value. Marketers can now tie specific campaigns to specific results with accuracy. But how can you show that to customers in a way they understand?

Results Take Time

Many business owners buy into the notion that SEO brings in immediate results. They may not know that it could take 60 days to six months to reach their goals. In fact, Forbes notes that it can take four to six months to see real results. So, while you’re busy working on SEO for your customers, you’ll need to show them that the big jump doesn’t happen overnight.

You may find that a big part of your job as a reseller is to reassure clients that the results they want are on the way. This requires keeping a few benefits in mind at all times to remind them of. Here are five you can start out with.

Know the Elevator Pitch Benefits

1. The Best Keywords: SEO resellers know the value of choosing appropriate keywords. While clients may have their own ideas of what they should rank for, SEO professionals know how to study a business’ customers and better understand what those customers look for and why. They then create content that answers the questions customers have, while including the keywords they use to find it.
2. Faster Website: Unless you’re speeding at 80 miles per hour on a street with a 45-mph limit, faster is always better. Faster websites load pages more quickly, process payments with no hiccups and offer instant gratification to customers. Forbes notes that Google likes faster websites as well. In fact, it penalizes slower sites, especially on mobile devices.
3. Efficient Crawling & Indexing: When professionals handle website crawling, they bring a few special benefits to the table. For starters, bots crawl all of the important pages on the website without wasting time on pages that do not provide value. This ensures that only the important pages get indexed.
4. Speaking Google’s Language: As a search engine, Google speaks in algorithms and decodes the information on a web page through that same filter. Regular human beings do not speak this language, and what’s worse, it keeps changing. It’s important for SEO to build pages that Google not only understands but ranks highly for the value provided.
5. Saved Time: While all of this takes time, it happens a lot faster than when business owners try to tackle this themselves. By providing faster results and surpassing milestones on the way to the first page or top three results, resellers earn their customer’s trust. Business owners also save the time they would have otherwise spent working on this themselves to instead focus on the core aspects of their business.

Are Paid Ads the Right Option?

No matter how often customers talk about investment for the greater good and growing brand awareness, what they really want is a solid return on investment. Because of this, many may prefer to go the route of paid ads, such as Google and Facebook’s PPC platforms. This can create an issue when doing SEO for your customers.

While PPC ads make great additions to any SEO campaign, there is one big caveat. They only bring in value for as long you run them. You know that, but trying to get your client to focus more on organic search results could prove difficult. So, here are a few ways you can help your clients to place higher value on organic success.

Connecting the Dots Between ROI and Organic Success

1. Rely on Analytics: Conversion is the most important result customers may use to judge their return on investment. By setting up milestones in Google Analytics based on website traffic and conversion rates, you can better show them how you gradually take them from Point A to Point B.
2. Understand the Point of Conversion: Conversation points will differ based on the type of organization and the products and services they provide. It may also differ by campaign. Potential examples include a phone call, email, free download, pledge for volunteer service or a donation.
3. Identify the Conversation Rate: After you understand how the conversion takes place, you will need to identify how many leads it takes to create one conversion. While your job is to generate leads, you may also assist with conversion rates by taking a look at the landing page. Is the website fast enough? Does the contact form ask for more information than customers want to give? What can you do to improve it?

The Proof Is in the Results

1. Provide the Paid Versus Organic Rate: Considering the immediacy of PPC results, it is only natural that a client may continue to urge their marketing agency to focus efforts there instead of organic results. However, a quick comparison may help them to see things differently. Use a plugin like Keywords Everywhere to show your client how much it would cost in PPC ads to achieve the organic results you bring in for less.
2. Understand What Customers Value: Not all customers value ROI the same. For example, a large for-profit company will be most concerned about its conversation rate in the form of sales. On the other hand, a small business wants to know how they rank up to larger competitors. Meanwhile, a cause-related nonprofit organization may be just as thrilled by the website traffic as donations, because more people are becoming aware of the issue it tackles.
3. Communicate Effectively: When submitting regular reports to customers, ensure that it highlights the specific areas they focus on. Wordy reports are a lot more difficult to follow, so consider using smart visualizations instead. Finally, keep the SEO jargon to a minimum.

The Bottom Line

When working on SEO for your customers, connecting the dots between investment and benefits is that aha! moment that turns them into lifelong believers in the power of SEO. You will need to learn more about the idiosyncrasies of their business and their own customers to better understand how to serve them. This will also help you to choose the best provider of white label SEO services to meet their needs.

Boostability is the leading white label SEO agency with partners world-wide. We are here to help your clients get in front of their customers first while working behind the scenes under your brand name. Contact us for more information!